#floppy diskettes

So, I'm working with a Macintosh Performa 636CD (circa 1994-1995) to read some old Macintosh-formatted floppy discs (circa 1991) with a collection of roughly 40 documents that appear to have been written with a version of MacWrite (or something compatible to that) that my friend's employer wrote and recently rediscovered.

Old Apple computers are so much fun... but for me, most any old computer is, honestly. My Performa is the oldest reliably-working Mac I own, but my Macintosh SE works every now and then, too.

Anyways, I acquired the Performa a number of years ago, complete with a nice "Macintosh Accessory Kit" that's been sitting in my room for a number of years. I got to looking through it last night and found some interesting tidbits, some pictured, many others not (the box had the system installation CD, and the original hard disk had just failed... now all's working just fine with a new drive at the moment).

The WordPerfect v3.1 has a sealed package with the original installation floppies (all 6 of them), and it's exactly the kind of software I need to read the files (as far as I know, at least), but... somehow it feels almost wrong to open these diskettes when it's been almost 20 years since their manufacture (18 and a possible half, to be precise). They're sealed... you just don't find that very often when you scavenge old systems from thrift shops and garage sales and the like.

Also, the America Online & CompuServe free disks & advertisements? Good for quite a laugh.

"Now with world wide web browser!"

"It's easy. It's fun. And it's FREE for 10 hours!"

"See the future of the internet now with 100 HOURS FREE!"

[sticker on envelope] "New! 500 hours FREE! (for a month)"

Just had to share that. And now it's late and I should probably get to sleep... tomorrow I shall tear that nicely-sealed bag of floppies open and install them.